Good Girl, Bad Girl(119)
“Well, why are you smiling?”
“Fuck off!”
“I love you, too.” She laughs as she disappears down the corridor, tossing her dreads and swinging her hips.
Cyrus pokes his head around the corner.
“Hi!”
“Hello.”
He hugs me. I stiffen. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to someone touching me like that.
“I have a surprise,” he says.
“More photographs.”
“Better.”
He wants me to close my eyes. I look at him suspiciously, but obey, letting him lead me out of my room and along the hallway. He tells me to mind my step when he opens the sliding door to the courtyard.
Poppy is tied to a baby tree, trying to rip it out of the ground. Let loose, she leaps all over me, pushing me backwards onto the grass, licking my face and hands.
Cyrus sits on a concrete bench and watches while we chase, wrestle, and run. Later, exhausted, I sit beside him. Normally I’d light a cigarette but I’m trying to quit.
“How have you been?” he asks.
“Fine.”
“Are you sleeping?”
“Yeah.”
He always starts this way—with the simple questions—before he begins asking me about my dreams and earliest memories; my fears and regrets.
“Victims of childhood abuse often dissociate,” he says, talking like a textbook. “They block out cognitive links and emotions. Sometimes they do it so completely, it’s as if they never consciously experienced trauma. That could be why you have so few memories.”
“It could be,” I say.
“Whatever was done to you as a child, it wasn’t your fault.”
“I know.”
“You don’t have to blame yourself.”
“I don’t.”
I know what Cyrus wants. Details. Facts. He wants to climb down into the same sewer that I escaped from. He wants to join me in the filth and lead me out again. He wants to know what went through my mind during all those hours, days, and weeks. What I heard. Why I stayed hidden. How I managed to stay alive.
I remember it all. I remember nothing important.
“I can understand you wanting to forget some things,” he says. “But don’t you want to know who you are or if you have family?”
“I have no family.”
“You mentioned your mother.”
“I won’t talk about her.”
“What about your childhood?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me,” says Cyrus. “And it will to you, if you let it.”
I sigh and close my eyes. “You want to go where I have been.”
“Yes.”
“To see what I have seen.”
“I think I’m owed.”
“I can’t go back there.”
“I’m not asking you to go back.”
“Yes, you are. You want to open up my mind and peer inside, but I am not a plaything. I am not an experiment.”
“I know what he did to you—what he took.”
I feel myself getting angry. “You know nothing.”
“Where did he find you?”
“He didn’t find me.”
“Come on, Evie, help me. Don’t let this monster win.”
“He’s not a monster.”
“He kidnapped you. He locked you up.”
“No.”
“He deserved to die.”
“Don’t you dare say that!”
“Hostages often grow attached to their captors, but that’s not love, Evie. Kidnapping a child. Imprisoning her. Abusing her. You can’t think that’s love.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Explain it to me.”
My eyes are fractured with tears that refuse to fall. “You want to know about love?” I whisper. “Love is allowing yourself to be tortured to death rather than tell people where someone is hiding. Love is dying slowly and horribly, rather than betraying them. You think Terry was a monster. You think he locked me in a room and abused me. You’re wrong. He died rather than tell them where I was hiding. He saved me.”
“Saved you from who?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why?”
“He made me promise.”
“That’s not a promise, Evie. It’s a threat.”
I give him a pitying stare and shake my head.
“Just tell me your real name,” he says. “Surely I deserve that much.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Everybody I love dies. I can’t let that happen to you.”
72
* * *
CYRUS
* * *
My nightmares no longer involve my family. Evie inhabits my dreams, calling my name, hiding in a dark place as chaos unfolds around her. I cannot save her. I can never run fast enough or jump high enough or reach far enough to grab her fingertips as she falls past me into the void. I wake screaming, damp with sweat, my heart hammering and her name dying on my lips.
I don’t know what triggered the explosion that killed Felicity Whitaker and destroyed part of my house. It could have been the central heating kicking in or static electricity, or maybe Felicity changed her mind. Evie doesn’t believe that. She saw the truth.